The head of Our Lord and Savior’s CDC is now on the record as supporting a federal excise tax on fattening foods and beverages to help fund government-run health care, and al-Los Angeles Times, part of the state-run media, has jumped aboard.
While Democrats await the results of bipartisan negotiations over health care reform in the Senate Finance Committee, one of the proposals put before the committee received a nod of approval from health officials today: taxing soda.
The committee — the last congressional panel expected to produce its own recommendations for health care reform — listened to arguments earlier this year both for and against imposing a three-cent tax on sodas as well as other sugary drinks, including energy and sports drinks like Gatorade.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a three-cent tax would generate $24 billion over the next four years, and proponents of the tax argued before the committee that it would lower consumption of sugary drinks and improve Americans’ overall health.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Weight of the Nation” conference today, CDC chief Dr. Thomas Freiden said increasing the price of unhealthy foods “would be effective” at combating the nation’s obesity problem, reports CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder.
Freiden said he was not endorsing the tax as a member of the administration but was “just presenting the science,” according to Ambinder. He also said policies that would reduce the cost of healthy foods would effectively bring down obesity rates.
Just presenting the science? Once again, as with other alleged science-based proposals from the Statists in power, it’s agenda-driven junk science. These people offer one tax after another, one set of government regulations after another, one set of Nanny State proposals after another and then hide behind “science.” Their junk science is nothing but agenda-driven, nothing but pure statism.
From the perspective of al-LA Times, it’s called “tough love for fat people by taxing their food to pay for their health care.” The newspaper calls for using the tobacco tax model to impost hefty surcharges — 10 percent to 30 percent federal taxes — on food deemed unhealthy.
For the record, the matter of obesity is a matter of calories in and calories out. Unless federal bureaucrats intend on (a) setting maximum consumption limits for Americans and (b) mandated a certain amount of exercise on a daily basis, there is no way the federal government can control the calorie balancing of every American.
Let’s not give them any ideas, however. This may be a job for The Messiah’s brownshirt brigade of mandatory civil service workers and community organizers leftwing rabble-rousers. You know, his civilian national security force as large and well funded as the U.S. military.
This part is pure Nanny Statism and should scare every American who still cherishes his or her freedom:
If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that’s their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)
“Facing the serious consequences of an uncontrolled obesity epidemic, America’s state and federal policy makers may need to consider interventions every bit as forceful as those that succeeded in cutting adult tobacco use by more than 50%,” the Urban Institute report says. It took awhile — almost 50 years from the first surgeon general’s report on tobacco in 1964 — to drive smoking down. But in many ways, the drumbeat of scientific evidence and the growing cultural stigma against obesity already are well underway — as any parent who has tried to bring birthday cupcakes into her child’s classroom certainly knows.
Key among the “interventions” the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.
This is all about control of your life and mine. Nothing more and nothing less. The disingenuous at best campaign to convince you that some person who is obese is costing you money and as a result gives you the right to dictate through government control how that person shoud live his or her life.
It’s all part of the class envy, class warfare based argument the Left has used to demonize tax cuts: namely that somehow when someone else gets a tax cut, your taxes are raised to “pay” for that tax cut, that life is a zero-sum game.
Once again, no food or beverage consumed in moderation is fattening or unhealthy. And it’s not the business of federal bureaucrats, members of Congress or The Second Coming of Christ what you and I eat and drink.
Once we get government-run health care, it will be. Since government will be paying the bills, government has the right to dictate how we live. Just like Mom and Dad when they paid our bills before we were adults. They could determine what we ate or drank, when we went to bed, just about anything else they wanted as long as we lived under their roof.
Do you really want to be reduced to the level of an 8-year-old by a collection of Statists who want control over your life? I stopped needed a parent years and years ago.
Have you? If you have, just say “Hell no!” to government-run health care. It’s an assault on our freedom.
This is one reason I as a non-smoker opposed the the anti-smoking campaign. I knew — as did many of you — that they wouldn’t stop at smoking. It would one thing after another that the Lifestyle Nazis disapproved of our doing or eating or drinking or anything else.
The anti-smoking campaigns had nothing to do with making Americans healthier. It was all about control over the individual and the restriction of individual liberties and freedoms.
This will be just one more restriction. But it’s all for our own good.
